Americans at Large

“California Dreamin’ ” and “Taken.”

Razvan Vasilescu and Armand Assante face off in a Romanian village.Credit OWEN SMITH

On August 25, 2006, a Romanian named Cristian Nemescu was killed in a car crash at the age of twenty-seven. He was returning from an editing suite, where he had been working on a cut of “California Dreamin’.” This was Nemescu’s first feature as a director, and we will never know exactly how the finished film would have looked; the regret, though deep, is not all-consuming, because “California Dreamin’ ” bears almost no trace of the tyro. It could use a trim, but only rarely does it strain for effect, and, for a young man, Nemescu was uncannily versed in the emotions of middle age—free-floating rancor, the creak of unhelpful wisdom, and a covetous sigh at the spectacle of lust. If it’s regret you want, don’t mourn the director; just watch his movie.

The year is 1999, during the conflict in Kosovo, and the place is Constanta, Romania, on the Black Sea. A platoon of American marines has arrived with a shipment of military radar, to be deployed near the Serbian border in support of air raids by the NATO coalition. The plan is to put the equipment on a train and escort it across Romania: hardly an errand to perplex the guy in charge, Captain Jones (Armand Assante). That’s what he thinks. On a sleepy summer’s day, the train grinds into a railroad station in the village of Capalnita, at the back end of nowhere, to be met by the devil incarnate. His name is Doiaru (Razvan Vasilescu), he is the stationmaster, and, like all the best Beelzebubs, he doesn’t look the part. With his lined and grizzled face, poised to crease into a smile, he could be the gentlest of patriarchs; but the man is a beast, who has built up a black market, terrorized the other villagers, and brought a nearby factory to its knees. He loves his daughter Monica (Maria Dinulescu), a sullen beauty of seventeen, but his love—or, as she sees it, his dread of being alone—vents itself as a fearsome wish to control. No wonder she longs to cut loose.

And here comes her chance: a herd of American boys, as dazed and horny as bullocks in the wrong pasture. They expect a brief halt, instead of which they linger for five days and browse among the locals. This is because Doiaru uncouples the engine and demands customs documentation, which nobody seems able to provide. Single-handed, in other words, he blocks the progress of American might, and why? A succession of haunting flashbacks to his own boyhood, in the Second World War, when he waited for Allied help that never came, suggests a possible cause, but Vasilescu’s earthy performance tells of something more stubbornly rooted: a force of ill will, which cannot abide the good will of others. The irony is that, in stopping the train, he sets off a burst of everything he loathes: friendship, zeal, and the fireworks of desire. The mayor of Capalnita, spotting a chance to put his little kingdom on the map, invites the troops to a barbecue party, where he wears a Stars and Stripes tie. We even get an Elvis impersonator, crooning “Love Me Tender” in a Romanian burr. There is nothing new, of course, in the comedy of the backwater that gets swamped by the mainstream, or by a gush of good fortune, but even films as winning as “Whisky Galore!” or “Local Hero” didn’t dare to propose that the backwater itself might be corrupted and crazed with boredom, whereas one father in Capalnita tells his son to flee to Bucharest and threatens to break his legs if he ever comes back. When Captain Jones takes the stage at a village meeting, at the mayor’s request, he describes the place as paradise. The elders applaud, but you know what their juniors would say.

So busily, and wittily, does Nemescu show these characters striking their various political attitudes (there is a hapless intrusion from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) that the film has no time to get locked into an attitude of its own. What it has, instead, is an appetite for human quiddity, and an eye for those fleeting shocks in which cultures strike and rebound. To this extent, it is Monica, not her father, who is at the movie’s heart; having conceived a passion for Jones’s handsome deputy, Sergeant McLaren (Jamie Elman), she gets an English-speaking classmate—who happens to adore her—to interpret the bashful endearments that she and the sergeant wish to trade. The result is a masterly, international update of the Cyrano situation. (“I would like to kiss you” is translated as “He wants to know what kind of music you listen to.”) On the one hand, Monica is impetuous to the point of brusque; when that kiss comes, his lips draw near for a tentative peck, and she practically jumps down his throat. On the other hand, taking a cue from Nemescu, she is wise beyond her years, and fully aware that McLaren is not an escape route but a midsummer crush. At the end, with the train finally set to leave, he begs her to write her phone number on his hand; having watched her recede into the night, he opens his palm, and finds that she has scrawled a childish sun. She has loved him tender, but let him go; the whole film, you might say—raunchy and delicate, endlessly alive to the dashing of hope—is a study in arrivals and departures. Hurrying back to the village, Monica finds it in uproar, with her father under attack. If ever the Americans were needed, now is the time; but Jones and his men are gone.

The conundrum posed by “Taken” is as old as cinema itself. Do stars degrade themselves when they take a role in trash, or does their very presence redeem the folly, turning up something that glitters amid the dross? A trenchcoated Robert Mitchum, for instance, sauntered through the villainous Europe of “Foreign Intrigue” (1956), but his saunter is pretty much all that remains; the rest of the movie was forgettable to start with. Now we have another looming hulk, Liam Neeson, laying similar waste to a posse of un-American scoundrels. Like Mitchum, Neeson has shoulders so wide that you have to inspect the back of his jacket to make sure that he didn’t leave the coat hanger in. Like Mitchum, too, he appears to move slowly, at his noble leisure, yet to act with daunting swiftness when the occasion demands. He is more alert than Mitchum, whose brand of cool verged on the narcoleptic, but both men lord it over their surroundings—not with a wink but with a bang. Why spoof the world when you can wreck it with a straight face?

In “Taken,” Neeson plays a former C.I.A. hand named Bryan Mills, who is divorced from his wife (Famke Janssen) and living in Los Angeles to be near his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace). If there’s one thing we’ve learned from “California Dreamin’,” it’s that seventeen-year-old daughters get into scrapes. And if there’s one thing we’ve learned from “24” it’s that anybody named Kim, with a father schooled in dirty work by the U.S. government, will have a large echo chamber where her brain is meant to be. Kim and a friend leave for a vacation in Europe, where, ignoring the advice of her father, they are abducted with such consummate speed that it might have been simpler if he had FedExed them directly to the kidnappers. Pausing only to borrow a private jet from his ex’s slimy husband, Mills flies to Paris, where he proceeds to work his way, without mercy, through a personal alphabet of undesirable aliens. This being a brisk affair, of little more than ninety minutes, he gets only as far as Albanians and Arabs, but, if I were an innocent Bermudan, let alone a Belgian, I would be starting to get nervous about a sequel.

The producer and co-writer is Luc Besson, and the director is Pierre Morel, who made the superior “District B13.” That had Paris under its fingernails, whereas “Taken” darts from one location to the next without probing the city that lies between the hot spots, although Neeson would argue that, once you learn to drive like a Parisian, the opportunities for sightseeing tend to flash past. His performance is the most perturbing thing in the film, even more so than its electrical-torture sequence or its revelations about sex-trafficking; Mills, like some older, vaster brother of Daniel Craig’s James Bond, seems driven to—or, increasingly, driven by—acts of vengeance that are only obliquely related to the wrong that is being avenged. The chop and swipe of his forearms, with or without a knife, become as mechanical as the hammer blows of a blacksmith, and the point at which he casually shoots a friend’s wife (who has invited him to stay for supper), in order to extract information from the friend, is either proof of Mills’s own madness or, at best, a thoughtful critique of the decline in domestic French cuisine. True, the friend has turned out to be false, but that in itself is a startling development, with Morel and Besson presumably happy to present their native land as not merely spiced with imported peril but intrinsically treacherous. Someone, no doubt, is already composing a thesis on “Symbolic paranoia and American foreign policy in mid-period Neeson,” and you do wonder how this commanding actor—who carries so much more conviction than the plot—felt about delivering the line “I’ll tear down the Eiffel Tower if I have to.” The movie opened in France almost a year ago; was it wise to delay its release here until the dawn of the new Presidency, when it so clearly belongs to the last one? ♦

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